“... at the moment of correct focus (this is what is the most amusing to calculate) … She is the lady in all her get-up, very fashionable, very ridiculous … or very pretty, who knows? Far off, among the walkers, she stands out like a golden pheasant in a henhouse. She approaches … I’m shy, trembling a little. Twenty metres … ten metres … eight ...”

“... from principals. Giles Broadway (executed with Fitzpatrick) had confessed to a sexual assault on Lady Castlehaven, but had claimed that penetration had never taken place because he had ejaculated prematurely. Castlehaven was convicted because of his wife’s deposition (although wives could not normally testify against their husbands), despite the fact that ...”

“... respectable reviews, and he was taken up by critics like Edmund Gosse, literary hostesses like Lady St Helier, and grandes dames like Violet Hunt, a former mistress of H.G. Wells and Ford Madox Ford. He now established himself as a prolific writer of novels, short stories and plays, and perfected his public persona: polite but cynical, with a streak of ...”

“... duty. Austen’s own attitude to fame was equivocal. Her books were published anonymously (by ‘a Lady’ or by ‘the author of …’) and she was determined to keep her identity hidden, if not from London circles (her brother Henry couldn’t resist boasting), then at least from the circles she moved in. Propriety was a factor, of course, but she doesn’t ...”

“... there by his extremely wealthy and successful cousin Simon Taylor. Taylor, according to Lady Nugent, the governor’s wife, ‘had a numerous family, some almost on every one of his estates’. Tailyour began a relationship with an enslaved woman, Polly, born Mary Graham, who was described as ‘mulatto’ on the baptismal certificates of her and ...”

“... of the Arthurian legend – such as the Holy Grail, and Bedivere’s return of Excalibur to the Lady of the Lake – are derived from the sagas of the Narts, another people dwelling far away in the Caucasus mountains. Could such stories have been imported by the Alans, a tribe which seems to turn up everywhere on the wilder shores of speculation? There ...”

“... 16th-century paper and in Medea’s hand, arranging a tryst: ‘Look out, in the left aisle, for a lady wearing a black mantle, and holding a rose.’ Boundaries between fantasy and fact seem to dissolve, as the magnetism of the past frustrates the aspirations of the present. The narrators of these stories have their own projects – they are ...”

“... Surely. Please forgive me. Whither Colette? With her catsin that secluded garden, the great lady, no longer young (his age) suffering stillthrough those overmastering bouts of passion … – The cats will spring sideways at themoths when by ten the air is blue as a morning glory. – After dinner, Sidonie-Gabrielle wrote – I mustn’t forget to ...”

“... to crowd themselves into a chair, and demand to be carried for a shilling as far as an airy young lady whom we scarcely feel upon our poles. Surely we ought to be paid like all other mortals in proportion to our labour. Engines should be fixed in proper places to weigh chairs as they weigh wagons; and those whom ease and plenty have made unable to carry ...”

“... quiet angles, is rather cornily pictured reading. She is said to have been mistaken for a cleaning lady when she turned up for the shoot. Really? In leaf-patterned stockings?There are also fantasies, lit up with defiant, glassy, fairground colour. Yevonde’s ‘goddesses’ sequence flirts with irony and with the ridiculous – Diana Mitford winsomely tilts ...”

“... take the eye to the foreground of the image; they have more character than the young lady at the clavichord, or even the painter himself. In a self-portrait you notice the bright pages of the large, open folio on which his hand rests before you look at his face. The eye is unwilling to leave the still lifes. Given that, sometimes at least, they ...”

“... composed lives of Catullus by arranging in a conjectural order the love-poems mentioning the lady whom he called Lesbia, and confidently told the public what roles were played in the life of Horace by Cinara, Lydia and Chloe. When the futility of this became apparent, scholars reacted by assuring the reader whenever a poet mentioned a ...”

“... too,’ he says, shoving his face into hers and taking a handful of eyeliners. Suddenly the little lady erupts. ‘Right,’ she says, ‘I’m a policewoman,’ and she brandishes her identification in his face as they do in police series. ‘You’re nicked.’ She isn’t exactly an intimidating figure and he’s practically out of the shop now anyway but ...”

“... on that day, she sometimes recited a mysterious poem called ‘Lasca’ about a spirited young lady in Texas who ‘sighed for a canter after the cattle’. A crack of the whip like a shot in a battle With the green below and the blue above And dash and danger and life and love. The spirited young lady came from East ...”

“... this is what can happen to great houses with ambiguous legacies.The copper beech tree on which Lady Gregory’s guests carved their names is close by. You can just make out some of the initials: GBS, SOC, WBY, JBY, AE. ‘All/That comes of the best knit to the best,’ Yeats wrote in ‘Upon a House Shaken by Land Agitation’. ...”